noncommissioned officers in the military. In contemporary Japan all government officials must pass entrance examinations, but the old system is perpetuated by a differentiation between the difficulty and comprehensiveness of the examination taken. Today prospective bureaucrats must sit for either the class A (
ko
*) or the class B (
otsu
) examinations; those who pass the first and are accepted by a ministry may advance to the highest executive levels of the career service, including the position of vice-minister, but those who pass the second cannot be promoted beyond the section chief level, and usually not that high.
University students hoping to enter government service take the class A examinations during their last year in the university. Those who pass and are selected by a ministry then become part of an entering class within the ministry. This identification with an entering cohort becomes the bureaucrat's most important attribute during his entire bureaucratic life, and it follows him long after he leaves government service. Entering classes establish vertical relationships among all high-level, or ''career" (
kyaria
), officialsor what are called relations between
sempai
(seniors, those of earlier classes) and
kohai
* (ju-
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niors, those of later entering classes). Both promotion to the level of section chief and retirement are in accordance with strict seniority. This age grading (
nenko
*
joretsu
) and "respect for seniority" (
nenji
soncho
*) among bureaucrats influences everything they do, not just their activities in a ministry. For example, as an aged man and a former prime minister, Kishi Nobusuke still habitually referred to Yoshino Shinji as his sempai, recalling their earliest relationship in the old Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce.
64
More poignantly, when Oba* Tetsuo, a former official of the Transportation Ministry and later president of All Nippon Airways, was hauled into the Diet to testify as a witness in the investigation of the Lockheed corruption case (1976), the press wrote that he shook with barely controlled anger under questioning. The explanation, the journalists said, was that the Diet member interrogating him was his former junior at the Transportation Ministry, and he was overcome by the impudence of a junior questioning a senior.
65
In place of the term gakubatsu, some Japanese analysts prefer
Todaibatsu
* (cliques of Tokyo University classmates) because of the predominance of Tokyo University graduates in the bureaucracy and in the upper echelons of the banking and industrial worlds. Even among the Todaibatsu*, there is the batsu of all batsuthe alumni of the Tokyo University Law School. In order to understand their influence it is necessary to know that when an entering class joins a ministry, its members are permanently divided into two career pathsthe path of "administrative officials," or generalists (
jimukan
), and the path of "technical officials," or specialists (
gikan
). This distinction differs from that between career (class A exam) and noncareer (class B exam) officials, but it has almost equally serious consequences. It is based on academic specialization in the university.
Only one ministry promotes technical officers to the top positionthe vice-ministershipand that is the Ministry of Construction. It was created after the war around the nucleus of the old Home Ministry's Civil Engineering Bureau, plus many jimukan officers drawn from the Home Ministry's regular ranks. The struggle by the technicians to achieve equal treatment in Construction was both famous and fierce. It fell to the socialist government of Katayama Tetsu during the occupation to name the first vice-minister of the new Ministry of Construction. The old Home Ministry cadres proposed as their candidate the jimukan official Ohashi* Takeo, a former police officer; and the engineers put forward as their candidate the gikan official Iwasawa Tadayoshi. The unions of the various segments of the old Home Ministry put intense pressure on the Katayama government to favor
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one side or the other. Nishio Suehiro, chief cabinet secretary and an old socialist, chose Iwasawa. He explained that he personally had been victimized by the police in Okayama during the militarist era, precisely at the time when Ohashi * had served as chief of the Okayama police. As a result of Nishio's choice, the Construction Ministry bureaucrats forged an unwritten rule that the vice-ministership would alternate between administrative and technical officials, a practice that has prevailed to the present day.
66
Within MITI only the head of the Mine Safety Bureau is open to a gikan officerin fact, only to a graduate of the School of Engineering, Department of Mining, Tokyo Universityand even here a pattern of alternation between generalists and specialists has developed. All other major posts in MITI and the other ministries, excluding the Construction Ministry and detached research institutes and other specialized organs, are monopolized by administrative officers. And the greatest source of administrative officers is the University of Tokyo's Law School.
According to a calculation of the National Personnel Authority, as of July 1, 1965, among 483 officials at the level of department chief (
bucho
*) and aboveall of whom had university degrees from law, economics, or literature departmentssome 355 (or 73 percent) were graduates of Todai* Law.
67
But Todai Law students do not go just to the governmentonly the best of them do. The rest go to top positions in the most important businesses in the country, and their affiliations with each other are legendary. Table 4 details the initial placement of the Todai Law classes of 1975 and 1976. Each class numbered around 690, of whom from 150 to 250 did not seek employment because they were continuing on in graduate work or had failed the Higher-level Public Officials Examination and were waiting to take it again the following year. Some 130 graduates of each class entered government service, choosing ministries in accordance with their own attainments and a rough rank ordering of the ministries in terms of their prestigeFinance, MITI, and Foreign Affairs on top; Welfare, Education, and Labor near the bottom. According to the
Mainichi
, "Before graduation, the Tokyo University counselors direct students to proper jobsgood enough for the Finance Ministry, or maybe not good enough for that but quite suitable for the Health and Welfare Ministry, or if this is undesirable, perhaps a leading business firm."
68
Todai classmates in and out of government keep in touch with each other, and one reason private businesses are glad to get them is for purposes of liaison with the government. Perhaps more important, the Todai connection means that both government offices and board
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TABLE
4
Placement of Graduates of the University of Tokyo Law School Classes of 1975 and 1976
Where graduate was placed
1975
1976
1. Central Government
Ministry of Finance
17
15